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Arianna Huffington debated Hugh Hewitt over Beck's lunatic rantings when he and Roger Ailes lied about his usage of the word "slaughtered" with Howard Kurtz. We exposed that lie here already, but then we were treated to Hewitt's buffoonery about Andy Stern and the same old conservative line being used to defend psycho word talk by conservatives and that was entertaining by itself if you can stand it.

Hewie: If you talk for thirty hours a week, you're going to use the word slaughter and you're going to use it sometimes without knowing it and I don't think we outta focus on it.

No need to respond to that idiocy. But he does try to change the subject and ask why FOX is so popular. Because they have catered to conservatives their entire existence.

Kurtz: let me come back to this question of whether you apply the same standards. Rahm Emanuel, the WH chief of staff said at a private meeting some months ago and used the word "retarded," talking about a democratic idea..."blanking retarded"...he's nbow apologized. You were asked on MSNBC, you said this is political correctness, let's not talk about it. Why not apply the same standards to Rahm?

C&L has commented on the Rahm situation and although what he said was disgusting, it still was behind closed doors and not for public consumption.

What Beck does is totally different and Howard knows this.

In trying to find a comparable situation (which happens all the time by the media,) Kurtz used Rahm's behind closed doors slur. Glenn Beck said it to millions of people and continues to say crazed things on a daily basis to millions of people publicly. Rahm is not a public speaker or a radio or TV talk show host. Do we really have to discuss Glenn Beck or Limbaugh or O'Reilly in this silly way? Please stop it.

Arianna did a great job on the debate, but it needs to be expanded to the entire FOX News network. Beck is but one cog in their wheel. Yes, it's a very twisted wheel, but the debate should center around Roger Ailes and their entire network in the end.

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Tackling Bill O'Reilly on his home turf is never easy, yet Jon Stewart more than held his own last night.

The L.A. Times has more:

But most of all, Stewart used his second appearance ever on "The O'Reilly Factor" to levy a robust critique of Fox News and its coverage of President Obama.

"Here's what Fox has done, through their cyclonic perpetual emotional machine that is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: They have taken reasonable concerns about this president and this economy and turned it into full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao," the comedian told his host.

"I think some people do that, but most people don't," O'Reilly responded, calling it "the narrative of a couple of guys."

That is, of course, a whole lotta hooey, as Stewart himself has ably limned.

You could tell that O'Reilly was on the defensive: He resorted to a cheap physical-intimidation tactic, shoving his finger at Stewart over the fact that Stewart made fun of Fox for cutting away from President Obama's tete-a-tete with the GOP last week. Stewart had to explain to him that he made fun of Fox because it was funny, not because he had anything against Fox.

Funny that BillO didn't bother to bring up the time that Stewart totally pwned Sean Hannity for showing fake footage. Guess it musta slipped his mind.

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It's been amusing watching Glenn Beck twist and squirm and try to explain what he meant last October when he proclaimed that President Obama was flying the American airplane right into the trees, "taking you to a place to be slaughtered."

After Arianna Huffington raised the matter with Fox Chief Roger Ailes this weekend -- and then explored it in some detail with Keith Olbermann -- Beck has been scurrying about coming up with a variety of shifting rationales for what he was saying.

First, he said, "I don't know if I've ever used the word 'slaughtered'." Then, upon discovering that he had indeed used it, still tried to claim he "had never used it on the air," but was only referring to SEIU's Andy Stern. Finally, he settled on the claim that he wasn't speaking "literally" about "slaughter," he was talking about, um, the economy! Yeah, that's the ticket!

That was the rationale he followed yesterday on his Fox News show, smirking and acting as though his rationale would reveal his critics for the fools they were. Of course, what you can really see is what a fool anyone who believes Glenn Beck is.

Here is what he actually said in October:

Beck: I told you yesterday, buckle up your seatbelt, America. Find the exit -- there's one here, here, and here. Find the exit closest to you and prepare for a crash landing. Because this plane is coming down, because the pilot is intentionally steering it into the trees!

Most likely, it'll happen sometime after Christmas. You're gonna see this economy come up -- we're already seeing it, and now it's gonna start coming back down again. And when you see the effects of what they're doing to the economy, remember these words: We will survive. No -- we'll do better than survive, we will thrive. As long as these people are not in control. They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered!

As Arianna noted in her response:

No, Beck contended again and again and again, the whole time he was just talking about "the economy." Barack Obama is going to slaughter the economy. Even though he clearly said "taking you" not "taking the economy."

So, to review the ever-changing explanations: Beck never used the word "slaughter" -- until it was proven that he did. Then he only used it in reference to Mao, Stalin, or Hitler -- until it was proven that this wasn't the case. Then, when he used it, he wasn't referring to the Obama administration, he was referring to Andy Stern. Then he was referring to Obama -- but didn't mean it literally.

Got it? You might need to use Beck's trademark chalkboard to keep track.

Continue reading »

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Bill O'Reilly has been irked at Joe Klein since last October, after Klein wrote a typical Villager piece for Time castigating President Obama for standing up to Fox News. That's not what upset O'Reilly, though. Rather, it was these lines:

Let me be precise here: Fox News peddles a fair amount of hateful crap. Some of it borders on sedition. Much of it is flat out untrue.

So last night on Fox, O'Reilly finally got his chance to pin Klein down for this, and found he had his hands full defending Glenn Beck:

Klein: I have worked with an awful lot of Fox journalists, the ones who actually bring you the news, like Carl Cameron and Major Garrett.

O'Reilly: And those people are good guys, right?

Klein: Those -- those are good guys, I think you're a good guy, we come from the same neck of the woods.

But I think that your pal Glenn Beck is peddling a lot of hateful crap.

O'Reilly: But he's funny! He's doing it in a funny way! What's hateful about it?

Klein: Oh, he's doing a hilarious -- I thought the part where he describes the president as intentionally steering the airplane of state into the ground was hilarious. And the stuff about Obama not being an American citizen? That was hysterical!

O'Reilly: He's got a blackboard out there, he's got a phone to the White House -- look, he is everyman sitting on a barstool. Why shouldn't everyman have a show?

Klein: No, no, he is Father Coughlin trying to delude and entertain the American people.

O'Reilly: That's such baloney. That's the left-wing line, that this guy is a threat to the union. If anybody thinks Glenn Beck is a threat to the union, they're insane!

Actually, the comparison to Father Coughlin is more than appropriate -- it fits like a glove.

And dontcha just love how Beck being "funny" means he isn't hateful? I understand Theodore Bilbo was quite the crackup too.

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From Think Progress -- ABC Panelists Criticize Ailes’ Evasion Of Why Fox News Cut Away From Obama-House GOP Conversation:

Guest host Barbara Walters cut off the conversation though, since the show was over. However, discussion on the topic then continued in the green room, even though Ailes wasn’t present. Both Huffington and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman criticized the network for its hypocrisy:

HUFFINGTON: Their framing of the President is that he’s radical, that he’s taking us down a dark, fascist or Bolshevik future — depending on the day. And there he was, rational, charming, and in full command of his facts. So the narrative fell apart and so the cameras stopped showing what was happening.

KRUGMAN: Yeah, I mean it’s — I thought it was actually quite funny except it has real consequences. There you have Roger Ailes, with this powerful, popular news network, whining about how the media are unfair to Republicans. I mean, he is a powerful person in the media — and of course, you know, “Fair and Balanced” is truly Orwellian and we know that. So it’s clear that Fox — I felt like yelling to him, “you can’t handle the truth,” because that was what was actually happening on the Fox coverage.

I wonder where Ailes and Walters were for this after the show segment. And of course George Will decided to defend Ailes and Fox News saying that the media we have now is better than what we had back when there were just three networks to choose from. Not without some push back from Huffington and Krugman. And of course Will feigns ignorance on just how bad Glenn Beck's show is by claiming he never watches it. I highly doubt George Will doesn't actually know just how bad Glenn Beck's show is. That just gives him an easy out to pretend he doesn't.

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[H/t Heather]

One of the key points President Obama made in his back-and-forth with House Republicans seems to be really sticking in the craw of the right-wing pundit class:

Obama: I mean, the fact of the matter is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your home base, in your own party. You've given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion, because what you've been telling your constituents is. 'This guy's doin' all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America!'

Bill Kristol, yesterday on Fox News Sunday:

Kristol: First of all, I agree with the president. I think he's been doing all kinds of crazy stuff that risks destroying America. But the good news is, a lot of it's been stopped.

Of course, he's not actually agreeing with the President -- but he certainly is proving his point, isn't he?

Indeed, it points up that it isn't just Republican congressmen telling their constituents that Obama is a radical black Marxist/fascist/nihilist out to destroy America. It's the entire right-wing pundit class -- most of all, nearly the entirety of Fox News and its talkers.

If anything, the congresscritters are just taking their cues from Fox and aping the talking points that flow out of the fetid imaginations of people like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and Bill Kristol.

And as long as that's the case, well, we wish the president lotsa luck in getting Republican Congressmen to behave any differently.

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When you watch Roger Ailes on TV, you can really see why Fox News is what it is: a compulsively mendacious propaganda operation. Because nearly every word out of Ailes' mouth is a lie, distortion or prevarication of some kind.

The most egregious yesterday on This Week, as John already noted, was in defense of Glenn Beck, after Arianna Huffington -- who has already made an issue out of Beck's rhetoric recklessness -- called Ailes out on it:

HUFFINGTON: Well, Roger, it's not a question of picking a fight. And aren't you concerned about the language that Glenn Beck is using, which is, after all, inciting the American people? There is a lot of suffering out there, as you know, and when he talks about people being slaughtered, about who is going to be the next in the killing spree...

(CROSSTALK)

AILES: Well, he was talking about Hitler and Stalin slaughtering people. So I think he was probably accurate. Also, I'm a little....

HUFFINGTON: No, no, he was talking about this administration.

AILES: I don't -- I think he speaks English. I don't know, but I mean, I don't misinterpret any of his words. He did say one unfortunate thing, which he apologized for, but that happens in live television.

Well, as John pointed out, this is flatly false. Just a couple of months ago, Beck was telling his audience that "progressives" like President Obama and SEIU chief Andy Stern were taking the country down the path to genocide:

Beck: I told you yesterday, buckle up your seatbelt, America. Find the exit -- there's one here, here, and here. Find the exit closest to you and prepare for a crash landing. Because this plane is coming down, because the pilot is intentionally steering it into the trees!

Most likely, it'll happen sometime after Christmas. You're gonna see this economy come up -- we're already seeing it, and now it's gonna start coming back down again. And when you see the effects of what they're doing to the economy, remember these words: We will survive. No -- we'll do better than survive, we will thrive. As long as these people are not in control. They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered!

Moreover, as Arianna pointed out, he talked last October about the Obama administration embarking on a "killing spree," inspired by Mao:

Spread the wealth -- hello, Mao -- that is what this is all about. And anybody not on board, look out because you too could be the next victim of the killing spree.

More to the point, the point of Beck's most recent big project, his fake "documentary" touting Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" thesis, is that the progressive movement -- represented by Hitler, Mao, and Stalin -- is responsible for all of the genocides of the previous century.

It's nothing new, in fact. Beck has been telling his audiences for some time that Obama and "the progressives" are planning all kinds of evil and nefarious activity in pursuit of the destruction of America -- including rounding people up into concentration camps, and marching us toward a "new" kind of fascism.

We've put together a compendium of these various moments.

So, who do you believe? Roger Ailes, or your lying eyes?

As Simon Maloy at Media Matters points out, Ailes also lied about Beck supposedly apologizing for an "unfortunate remark." Moreover, in spite of his endless deluge of misinformation and lies, Beck has not once apologized for a single thing he has said on Fox. On the few occasions when he has corrected a falsehood, he has decidedly not apologized; instead, he has used those occasions instead to launch fresh rhetorical assaults on the persons about whom he's already lied.

Seems a perfect fit for Ailes, really, considering just who Roger Ailes is and what he's done for years. Fox is just the final outcome of a lifetime stoking the politics of resentment -- a politics stoked by hate, fear, and above all, lies.

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Roger Ailes was a guest on ABC's THIS WEEK and after watching the entire round table discussion I understand why FOX News say what they do. Roger made it crystal clear by reinforcing every radical notion that is said about the president and his agenda on FOX and then uses nonsense to defend Glenn Beck's bizarre rantings. I'll have more on Ailes later, but Arianna called him out over FNC's behavior as soon as the topic turned toward the administration's relationship to FOX News.

HUFFINGTON: Well, Roger, it's not a question of picking a fight. And aren't you concerned about the language that Glenn Beck is using, which is, after all, inciting the American people? There is a lot of suffering out there, as you know, and when he talks about people being slaughtered, about who is going to be the next in the killing spree...

(CROSSTALK)

AILES: Well, he was talking about Hitler and Stalin slaughtering people. So I think he was probably accurate. Also, I'm a little....

HUFFINGTON: No, no, he was talking about this administration.

AILES: I don't -- I think he speaks English. I don't know, but I mean, I don't misinterpret any of his words. He did say one unfortunate thing, which he apologized for, but that happens in live television. So I don't think it's -- I think if we start going around as the word police in this business, it will be...

HUFFINGTON: It's not about the word police. It's about something deeper. It's about the fact that there is a tradition as the historian Richard Hofstetter said, in American politics, of the paranoid style. And the paranoid style is dangerous when there is real pain out there. I mean, with...

AILES: I agree with you. I read something on your blog that said I looked like J. Edgar Hoover, I had a face like a fist, and I was essentially a malignant tumor...

HUFFINGTON: Well, that's...

AILES: And I thought -- and then it got nasty after that...

HUFFINGTON: ... that was never by anybody that we had...

(CROSSTALK) AILES: Then it really went nasty, and I thought, gee, maybe Arianna ought to cut this out, but..

We now have to question if Roger Ailes does understand the English language. Ailes uses the old method of quoting a single post that attacks him from the Huffington Post as some sort of justification for the behavior of FOX News. Conservatives are always good at deflecting criticisms and trying to equate a small sliver of a blog post to Beck's entire hour long freak show that day after day calls liberals 'parasites' and pictures President Obama as a Nazi wanting to slaughter people. When Arianna calls out Beck for his violent language, Roger says we can't be the word police and then says he understands him. You see, Beck only meant to be outlandish against Stalin. Ailes is lying of course.

MMTV:

But now, last night, I get there and I see, I get on the website, and I see that Obama wants to legalize the illegal aliens, you know, when unemployment is 8.5 percent and underemployment rate is 15.6 percent. You know, you're having a hard time finding a job, you know, without having to be forced -- do you have any matches -- forced to complete, you know, compete with a whole new crop of workers.

So what does Obama do, he says, boy, I'm not -- I'm just out of stuff to do. What else could I possibly do to the American people?

President Obama, why don't you just set us on fire? For the love of Pete, what are you doing? Do you not hear -- do you not hear the cries of people who are saying stop? We would like some sanity in our country for a second!

We didn't vote to lose the republic. We didn't vote for any of this stuff. We voted for change.

When Glenn Beck poured gasoline over a lady and said Obama wanted to see Americans burn, that wasn't about Stalin, Roger. Do you think that might be incendiary?

UPDATE: Here's the post when Beck talked about being "Slaughter"

Beck: Black Obama fans were 'taught to be slaves,' while progressives like Stern are 'taking you to a place to be slaughtered'

It came, incidentally, at the end of an equally incendiary attack on the SEIU's Andy Stern -- the day before, Beck told his audience that Stern was "really running our country" -- which he wrapped up with a truly vicious attack on both the Obama White House and on progressives in general:

Beck: I told you yesterday, buckle up your seatbelt, America. Find the exit -- there's one here, here, and here. Find the exit closest to you and prepare for a crash landing. Because this plane is coming down, because the pilot is intentionally steering it into the trees!

Most likely, it'll happen sometime after Christmas. You're gonna see this economy come up -- we're already seeing it, and now it's gonna start coming back down again. And when you see the effects of what they're doing to the economy, remember these words: We will survive. No -- we'll do better than survive, we will thrive. As long as these people are not in control. They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered!

Evidence doesn't enter in the equation for Roger Ailes.

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Glenn Beck's chalkboard talks are becoming notorious for their ludicrousness, so in most regards, yesterday's was really nothing exceptional. But it was so absurd that it was worth noting, because it's really emblematic of just how far gone Beck really has become.

The point, as you can see, was to claim that President Obama is taking the same path toward dictatorial rule as Hugo Chavez.

No, really.

Because Obama's history is just like Chavez's:

-- Chavez first attempted to come to power through a military coup.

-- Shortly after his election, he called for a constitutional convention that rewrote the Venezuelan Constitution.

-- He survived a short-lived coup in 2002.

-- He has called for an end to presidential term limits.

-- He has shut down opposition press organs.

Beck seems to think that calling out Fox as a propaganda organ is the exact same thing as ordering it to cease operations. Because, you know, any critical rebuttal of Fox's endless war on Obama is exactly the same thing as silencing dissent.

You could say there's a distinct lack of perspective here. Or, as BC's Alan Wolfe put it, Beck "lives in a complete alternative universe."

A Tiny Revolution: Paddy Chayefsky and the Supreme Corporate's idiotic decision.

Washington Monthly: Steve Benen's strategy memo on health care reform.

Pam's House Blend: Homosexuality is like... anorexia?

Lance Mannion: Tax credits? Tax credits?

Satirical Political Report: Massachusetts lesson learned.

Jonah Goldberg, Glenn Beck and the tea bag crowd don't know much about history, but it's International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Guest post by Batocchio. Temporarily e-mail tips to batocchio9 AT yahoo DOT com.

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Glenn Beck didn't bother to even have any guests on his program yesterday because he was too busy calling progressives "parasites" and "a virus" and making insane connections that only he understands. That's typical eliminationist rhetoric.

He can't handle differences of political belief, so he wants to wipe out liberals and progressives from the face of the earth. He believes that since he uses a blackboard with chalk and incoherently erases a letter off of one word to form new words that will make it all comprehensible.

Beck's been working himself up into a frothy, psycho-frenzied lather about destroying all progressives as he promotes Jonah Goldberg's dishonest book and thesis about fascism, which he uses for his own demented documentary. And apparently I should be eliminated too.

Wow, all because I was not happy with Lynne Woolsey for hosting a fundraiser for CA-36's very own Blue Dog, Jane Harman, and wrote a few posts about it calling for her to stop.

Beck: The traditional democratic party is going up against the radical fringe left.
I've been telling you that there's a difference between democrats and progressives from the beginning now but nobody wants to listen. Here it is. Their are Blue Dog democrats and but they are not socialists, Marxists radicals. They are more like your grand father's democrat. Most Democrats still love America, they love the founders and they love the constitution and believe in this country. But then there's another group and they have infiltrated not just the Democratic party, but the republican party...

Speak softly and carry a big stick. blah, blah, blah...We got this from an insider. Wait until you hear this story. The co-chair of the CPC...

How many times have I said they are like a virus feeding on the host of republic.

The progressives are parasites inside the democrat....The California progressives weren't the only ones upset. John Amato of Crooksandliars wrote on Huffington Post.

"for Woolsey to holding a fundraising events for a known Blue Dog should be a firing offense for the CPC."

Progressives Democrats for America joined in, They started an online petition asking her to withdraw from the event. Woolsey said no. I don't know how this story ends quite frankly it's California and it's all going to end in a mudslide right into the bottom of the ocean eventually anyway, but let me tell you something. The last time the progressives were in this position and they started gobbling power and they exposed themselves people caught on and hated them.

That threatens him, so he warns that people like me are destroying the Democratic Party. Of course, you know he loves the Democratic Party as much as he loves eating sandpaper. He opines that progressives have been hiding for years and years in the wilderness and suddenly snuck up on him.

He's the Teabagger King and is trying to purge all moderate Republicans from the GOP, as if they were a disease, and replace them with arch-conservative haters. And while he's at it, he wants to do the same for Democrats.

Of course, Glenn has nothing but our own best interests at heart. Riiiiiiiight.

UPDATE: After watching this again and adding a little transcript, isn't it nice for Beck to hope that California gets hit with an earthquake that destroys the state and we end up as fish food. What a guy, that Beck. He not only is hoping for progressives to be eliminated, but the entire state of California as well.

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Well, Glenn Beck's special "documentary" -- at least, that's what he calls it -- "The Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free Or Die" aired Friday, and it was pretty much exactly what we predicted: A long promotion for Jonah Goldberg's fraudulent Liberal Fascism and its underlying thesis, to wit, that fascism is "properly understood" as "a phenomenon of the left."

In Beck's hands, of course, this mishmash of a theory gets mashed even more, so that fascism is indistinguishable from communism and socialism, and that all are essentially identified in the bundle of the progressive movement, which is Beck's ultimate target.

On Friday, Beck worried that "the academic bloc" of the progressive movement would be arraying its forces to attack him for this piece of work (and it is a real piece of work). Probably, most of them will dismiss it as just another piece of lunacy from the nation's fearmonger in chief.

But it's obvious that, despite the cold reality that Goldberg's thesis is profoundly dishonest and the most odious kind of historical fraud, right-wingers like Beck not only believe it but have embarked on avidly promoting it -- especially among the Tea Party set, where the signs calling Obama a fascist are almost as common as those decrying his tax increases.

As I mentioned Friday, I began some months ago organizing some of the more authoritative historical experts -- historians and political scientists -- in an effort to finally produce a serious response from academics to Goldberg's traduced version of history.

Today, at History News Network, you can read the initial essays.

In addition to my introduction, there are four essays:

-- Robert O. Paxton, professor emeritus at Columbia University and the author of The Anatomy of Fascism, leads off the essays with "The Scholarly Flaws of Liberal Fascism."

-- Roger Griffin, professor of political science at Oxford Brookes and the author of The Nature of Fascism, has a piece titled "An Academic Book - Not!"

-- Matthew Feldman, professor of history at University of Northampton, and a co-editor of several academic texts on fascism, offers his assessment on why refuting Goldberg still matters: "Poor Scholarship, Wrong Conclusions".

-- Chip Berlet, senior researcher at Political Research Associates and the co-author (with Matthew Lyons) of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, has penned a history of Goldberg's arguments, "The Roots of Liberal Fascism: The Book."

For those who watched Beck's "special," the following excerpt from Paxton's piece alone may suffice:

Continue reading »

Digby caught this and it's very interesting:

Brownie disses the teabaggers:

Brown said his model for governing would be McCain, who would also be the first appointment in a packed schedule of meetings that morning. "I have great respect for Senator McCain," he said of the Arizona senator, who was one of the first establishment players to support his seemingly quixotic bid against Attorney General Martha Coakley. "I've known him for a while, long before this, and you know he is a war hero and kind of a maverick independent thinker. While I want to be a Scott Brown Republican, I want to rely on everybody on both sides of the aisle," he added, "I've told my leadership already that I'm not a rubber stamp for anybody."

And Brown expressed reluctance to be associated at all with the Tea Party movement that helped elect him.

"There may be members of a certain group that supported me," he said, "but I had supporters from every walk of life. And to focus on one specific group is a disservice to the campaign -- it's inclusiveness in making sure that everyone has a voice."

And I don't know what this is about, but it's creepy:

Asked about Glenn Beck's suggestion on his radio show that Brown be fitted with a chastity belt before "it could end up with a dead intern," Brown said, "You know, name calling and all that stuff? I'm way past that. My daughters know that I love them and there is nothing in the world I wouldn't do for them."

The teabaggers were endowed by their creator, FoxNews, to support Brown and there is no underestimating how much they had to do with it. It will be very interesting to see how they react to being publicly dismissed. If they take it, we'll know that they are just the typical Republican base falling into line. If not --- well, then the GOP has a problem if they take the Scott Brown attitude. They hate McCain.

Scott Brown is playing possum with his Tea Party stance because he knows they were really, really behind him and without the support of the Right Wing Noise Machine that is backing the teabaggers, he wouldn't have had a chance to win.

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Glenn Beck has a special "documentary" he's going to show his audience today on Fox News titled "Live Free Or Die," and what's evident is that the entire show is going to be predicated on expanding on Jonah Goldberg's fraudulent thesis in his bestselling book, Liberal Fascism, namely, that fascism is "properly understood" as "a phenomenon of the left."

What's apparent is that Beck intends to leap from this fraudulent beginning to the bizarre conclusion that the progressive movement has always produced genocide -- mostly by equating fascists with communists with progressives, which is part of the underlying illogic of Goldberg's thesis. It seems he will be promoting the conclusion that President Obama is leading America on a path to genocide as well.

Indeed, anyone who's been watching Beck's show the past year is aware that his continually building thesis about Obama -- that he is secretly a black radical Marxist/fascist/socialist/whateverist intent on creating a totalitarian regime in America -- is largely built on Liberal Fascism and its thesis. Beck has
had Goldberg on numerous times to promote the fraud. And his long-running attacks on the progressive movement as the "cancer" destroying the country -- which has been the entire point of Beck's show this week, including the conclusion that progressives may try to assassinate Obama if he moves to the center -- have been nakedly drawn straight from Goldberg's Planet Bizarro version of history. (The giveaway has been Beck's running insistence that Woodrow Wilson is at the root of this evil.)

Towards the end of yesterday's segment, Beck fretted that "the academic wing" of the progressive movement was going to attack him viciously for his "documentary." Goldberg notes that he's faced the same for his book -- though in reality, academics have been largely silent on the subject of Liberal Fascism.

That, however, is about to end.

I've already explained in some depth exactly why Goldberg's thesis is so profoundly dishonest, especially when it comes to the mountain of historical facts that contradict his claims, which he simply elides. But I'm not an academic -- just a journalist who has real-life experience writing about real American fascists.

Academic historians, in fact, have tended to shy away from tackling Goldberg's book, precisely because it is such an obvious work of propagandistic polemics, and his methodology so shabby, that they haven't considered the work (such as it is) contained therein to be worthy of academic consideration.

But because Goldberg's fraudulent thesis has now become conventional wisdom on the American Right -- and particularly among the Tea Party set, where signs equating liberals to fascists and Obama to Hitler have become commonplace -- many historians, especially those who have specialized in the serious study of fascism, have come to the realization that calling out Goldberg for his fraud is long overdue.

To that end, I began organizing last fall a series of essays from academic historians and political scientists critiquing Liberal Fascism. The essays are now ready, and this Monday, Jan. 25, they will be presented at History News Network.

In addition to my introductory essay, there will be essays by four widely acknowledged experts on fascism:

-- Robert O. Paxton, professor emeritus at Columbia University and the author of The Anatomy of Fascism.

-- Roger Griffin, professor of political science at Oxford Brookes and the author of The Nature of Fascism.

-- Matthew Feldman, professor of history at University of Northampton, and a co-editor of several academic texts on fascism.

-- Chip Berlet, senior researcher at Political Research Associates and the co-author (with Matthew Lyons) of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort.

Beck will probably believe this response from academics is inspired by his show today, but only in a purely accidental sense: It's been in the works for some months now, and was more inspired by the broad absorption of Goldberg's thesis as conventional wisdom -- of which Beck's constant promotion of it is a not-insignificant part. Let's just say the timing will indeed be serendipitous.

Incidentally, Beck gave us a little preview of the "documentary" on his Tuesday show:

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David and I scanned through Fox News last night and surprisingly, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren didn't mention the very controversial and pro-corporatist Citizens Untied ruling by the Supreme court. Not a word. It reminds me of how they pretty much ignored the Haiti earthquake.

Bret Baier's "All Star Panel" discussed it with Charles Krauthammer and Fred Barnes loving it, while Mara Liaisson admitted that the ruling would benefit Republicans in 2010 and 2012 because corporations have much more money than the labor unions.

Shepard Smith had a short report on it that just recapped the decision and added a few sound bites from Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell.

But it's really clear that while the big opinionators loved the ruling off air -- because now corporations are being viewed as individuals who have the freedom to pour tons of money into the political system, a fact that will heavily favor conservatives -- they must understand that Americans will not love this ruling, because it gives Big Corp an even more unfair advantage in our election process. Americans are fed up with the influence these money-changers and powermongers have on the process.

How can they defend this ruling when they have been promoting a phony right-wing populism? If the teabaggers are truly as opposed to corporate power as they claim, they logically would hate this ruling. Or will their producerism overwhelm them?